As promised, I’ll be providing daily weather outlooks for the Chevron Houston Marathon from now until race day, Jan. 17th.
At 13 days out there’s still not a whole lot we can say with confidence, especially because forecast accuracy after 7 to 10 days is pretty low even though forecast models run out to 16 days. With that said I’m feeling decent about not seeing abnormally warm conditions on race day, and we may very well see cooler than normal conditions. So let’s discuss what we know, and what we don’t.
Perhaps the best way to gauge conditions from this far out is to look at the ensemble runs of global forecast models. That is, the GFS and European models are each run about 50 different times with slightly different starting conditions. This gives a range of outcomes, and from looking at all of these ensemble runs we can get some probabilities on conditions. For example, do most of the ensemble runs show warmer or colder conditions?
The GFS model is colder than the European during the next two weeks as it predicts a major Arctic outbreak across Texas in about 11 days time. If this event occurs we could see very cold temperatures on marathon day, like in the low 30s on the morning of the run. (Is that too cold for most people?)
Anyway, the model forecasts the probability of a high temperature greater than 50 degrees Fahrenheit at noon to be 30 percent, or less. This is good, obviously, because anything warmer than 50 degrees can become uncomfortable after several hours of running.
